Chinese higher education which is in the critical stage of comprehensive reform shows great enthusiasm in face of the emerging MOOCs and has begun to consciously pay attention to the development of online education. China's Ministry of Education issued Opinions on Strengthening Construction, Application, and Management of Online Open Courses in Institutions of Higher Learning JG (2015) No. 3 in 2015, which provides guidance for the introduction, construction, usage, and management of MOOCs by universities. Till now, MOOCs in China have made considerable progress, and the 14 platforms investigated by our research team have been able to gather a total of 1388 courses of various types. Then how should universities construct, use, and manage MOOCs? What are the changes introduced by MOOCs to universities in terms of teaching, learning, and management? The research team of this book adopted online questionnaire survey and paper questionnaires in some of the universities in China and has investigated and analyzed the progress made by universities in educational informationization, construction, and usage of MOOCs in universities and existing problems.

Announcements

Major OER initiative announced in Brazil: The Ministry of Education of Brazil has just published an ordinance that determines that all educational resources paid for by the ministry which are to be used in basic education must be openly licensed and use open format/standards whenever possible. This will have huge impact on the number of educational resources available in Portuguese for this sector. Resources will be made available in a new open-source repository. A short description of our work on the open education initiative.